A first novel that sacrifices a serious consideration of eugenics and the price of progress to the greedy demands of a...
Futuristic flourishes deck out a down-and-dirty story of a murderous conspiracy that roils an elite boarding school and its brainwashed students.
The year is 2036. Gyromobiles have largely replaced automobiles. They cruise the skies above San Angeles, a city created to handle California’s population explosion. In the desert, a massive tower thrusts skyward. This is Stansbury School, home to 4,000 students (known as specimens), ages 6 through 18, most destined for Ivy League schools. They exist on an elaborate med cycle that stimulates intellectual and physical growth while suppressing sexual and aggressive urges. A lethally armed security force controls “unbalanced” specimens. Foremost among these is Cooley, a rebellious orphan on scholarship who won’t take his pills. His adversary is another scholarship orphan, Goldsmith, unpopular valedictorian and steely enforcer of the rules who yearns for friends. Might a crisis cause the two to bond? Yes indeed. Five Stansbury graduates, unbalanced ex-specimens, have been brutally murdered in San Angeles. Cooley stumbles onto the scene of the sixth serial killing and is set up as the perpetrator, but then his nemesis Goldsmith uncharacteristically breaks the rules and visits the San Angeles murder scene. He realizes he and Cooley are both pawns, and eventually discovers the killings are linked to an imminent Senate vote in Washington that would bestow a trillion dollars annually on Stansbury. The novel spins out of control as murder reaches the school’s executive suites. In comic-book heroics involving laser syringes and heat-seeking ThermaGuns, the orphans hold off Security long enough to allow a former valedictorian, despite her “deep, red, and wet” wounds, to simulcast damning testimony to the Senate committee.
A first novel that sacrifices a serious consideration of eugenics and the price of progress to the greedy demands of a tangled plot.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-34096-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
Four short fairy tales with a contemporary edge, and one novella-length tale that brilliantly transforms a story of middle- age angst into a celebration of serendipity and sex. Byatt (Babel Tower, 1996, etc.) uses that parallel world of fairy tales—which closely resembles our own in motive, character, and outcome—to explore the sources of hope and imagination. ``The Glass Coffin'' reworks a traditional quest tale as a tailor seeking employment helps a stranger and, as a reward, is given a glass key and certain mystifying instructions to follow that lead him to a beautiful sleeping princess. In ``Gode's Story,'' a young woman is true, while her feckless sailor lover betrays her, only to find his happiness with a new bride short-lived when he sees her among the Dead riding the ocean waves. ``The Story of the Eldest Princess'' is a witty reworking of the quest tale as well as a low-key analysis of the role of fate, choice, and character as a princess steps out of her preordained role in life to rescue her people. And ``Dragon's Breath'' is a wry morality tale about the unsuspected ``true relations between peace and beauty and terror'' revealed when dragons destroy a village. But Byatt is at her best in the novella, about what happens when Dr. Gillian Perholt, in Turkey to attend a conference on stories, is granted the chance to make three wishes, which all come true. Troubled by visions of her mortality and her husband's desertion, fiftyish Gillian buys a dirty but striking old glass bottle and takes it back to her hotel. When she washes it, a handsome Djinn appears, who gives her the younger body she wishes for, makes love to her as she wishes, and after talk, tales, and travels, grants her her third wish. An intelligent detour with an exemplary guide through Keats's ``magic casements'' to fairy land. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-42008-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
BOOK TO SCREEN
Sprightly and open-ended, with an agreeable dystopian pitch.
An earnest sci-fi adventure about robotic evolution, from newcomer (and nuclear engineer) Marino.
“For the first time in 100,000 years, something other than primates was competing for the title of dominant life form on this planet.” The planet is Earth; the “something other” are Athenas, robots that are becoming more sophisticated every day–more lifelike in a human way, as well as much more capable of understanding and using vast inputs of data. Unknown to each other, a select team of scientists develop the robots, tinkering with their particulars at separate facilities. One of these talents is Eric Lorenz, a nuclear scientist with an aptitude for complex computer work, who also suffers from a disastrous romantic life and the need for a parental figure–both circumstances intimately and affectingly etched by Marino. Though he doesn’t consider the Athenas an immediate threat, Eric realizes that, once ascendant, they may consider humans a nuisance not worth keeping around. But the greater threat comes from outside the hermetic walls of the research facility: humans, be they religious fundamentalists or latter-day Luddites, who have issues accepting robots as equals. Marino keeps the creation and functionality of the robots plausible with a nifty slathering of computerese–“Our processors are Alpha/Risk 8-chip clusters, using a flavor of Linux, with EMRAM and Media Butler style fixed data drives,” notes one Athena–which may snow some readers but will stand the test for the more technologically conversant.
Sprightly and open-ended, with an agreeable dystopian pitch.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2005
ISBN: 0-595-36507-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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